The present invention relates to content management systems, and more particularly to systems and methods for retroactive shared content item links.
Conventionally, there are many different ways users can share digital content items (“content items”) with each other. One way to share a content item with a user is to send the content item as an attachment to an electronic mail (e-mail) message. Another way is to provide the content item on a portable data storage medium such as flash drive that is physically delivered to the user. Digital content items include files, folders, documents, images, audio, video, streaming media, or other logical collections of data or digital information.
Conventional methods for sharing content items are cumbersome and inefficient. For example, an attachment to an e-mail message may not be received because of attachment size limits or mailbox size limits enforced by an e-mail server. As another example, if the flash drive on which the only copy of a content item is stored is lost or destroyed, then the content item is potentially lost forever.
One possible approach for sharing a content item is for the sharing user to upload the content item to a server from which another user can download the content item. However, once the content item has been uploaded to the server, it may be difficult for the sharing user to retain control over who else can download the content item from the server. For example, one user that the sharing user intended to download the content item from the server may share the location on the server of the content item with another user the sharing user did not intend to download the content item from the server.
The approaches described in this section are approaches that could be pursued, but not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated, it should not be assumed that any of the approaches described in this section qualify as prior art merely by virtue of their inclusion in this section.